Resolving WordPress URL Inconsistency: Troubleshooting Guide: A Step-by-Step Guide

• Navigate to Settings > Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard.
• Select a permalink structure that ends with a slash (/). WordPress will then try to redirect all non-trailing slash URLs to the trailing slash version.
• Save the changes and clear your site’s cache and try again.

For Apache:

If your site is hosted on an Apache server, add the following code to your .htaccess file:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

This code will ensure that all the URLs without a trailing slash are permanently redirected to URLs with the trailing slash.

For Nginx:

If your site is hosted on an Nginx server, add the following to your server configuration:

To enforce trailing slash:

rewrite ^/(.*[^/])$ /$1/ permanent;

To remove trailing slash:

rewrite ^/(.*)/$ /$1 permanent;

Now make sure that all internal links within your site use a consistent URL format. This can be manually checked or with the help of tools like Yoast SEO, which can assist in maintaining consistent URLs throughout your site’s content.

Monitor Traffic: Use Google Analytics and Search Console to monitor how traffic responds to these changes.

Test URL Behavior: Regularly test your URLs to ensure they are behaving as expected without reverting to previous patterns.

Plugins often override default WordPress behaviour. To isolate potential conflicts:

• Disabled all plugins.
• Re-enabled them one by one, testing the URLs after each activation.

This step identified the Permalink Manager plugin as the source of the inconsistency.

For URLs Needing a Trailing Slash

To ensure all URLs end with a trailing slash, use the following .htaccess rules:

• Apache

.htaccess:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ /$1/ [L,R=301]

This configuration redirects URLs that lack a trailing slash to a version that includes one, ensuring consistency.

For URLs to Remove Trailing Slashes

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]

This setup redirects URLs that end with a slash to their non-trailing slash counterparts.

If these redirects have worked properly you are good to go, but in case they work partially but do not resolve the issue, then proceed with 5th step.

To enforce trailing slashes:

Insert the following function into your theme's functions.php file:

add_action('template_redirect', function() {
if (!is_singular()) return;
$url = trailingslashit(home_url(add_query_arg([], $wp->request)));
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] !== parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH)) {
    wp_redirect($url, 301);
    exit;
}
});

This function ensures that all single pages (not posts) have a URL ending with a slash.

To remove trailing slashes:

Alternatively, to enforce non-trailing slash URLs, use:

add_action('template_redirect', function() {
    if (!is_singular()) return;
    $url = untrailingslashit(home_url(add_query_arg([], $wp->request)));
    if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] !== parse_url($url, PHP_URL_PATH)) {
        wp_redirect($url, 301);
        exit;
    }
});

This function redirects all URLs to a format without trailing slashes.